Korea in Turmoilish

Korea's hit a rough patch lately.  Not for me personally, my life is just as awesome as it ever was.  Politically however, things have been better.  

Last weekend, my friend Barry and I took a 4.5 hour bus ride up to Seoul to visit Tim, a friend from home, and to take in some new flavors.

The differences between Mokpo and Seoul are pretty stark.  Barry captured it perfectly, saying, "There are really three Koreas: North, South, and Seoul."  After being in Mokpo for the past 3 months, I agree.  Seoul is a foreign country.

I don't stand out in Seoul.  I'm one of many, many foreigners.  The common shop owner speaks a bit of English, and has had some practice implementing it.  Seoul has foreign restaurants and live music venues.  Seoul also has noise and pollution.  It's a much more international place, but is just not what I have come to know as Korea.

In terms of international food, Mokpo's got a McDonald's, a Pizza Hut, and a couple Dunkin' Donuts.  I guess only crappy chains are allowed in Mokpo.  Culinary diversity is so nonexistent that I've even given up my personal boycott of Micky D's on a couple occasions to remember what a french fry tastes like.  In Seoul we were able to snag a killer Indian buffet and lunch at a pretty awesome Irish grill kinda restaurant.

Wandering the city on Saturday, we came to a huge indoor market.  The place was pretty bizarre.  Rows of old ladies set up shop next to each other selling what appeared to be the same things, pig intestines, noses, ears, and hooves.  All the leftover pig bits.  We decided to be adventurous, and I think it was Tim who decided we should go for some nose.

The lady running the shop smirked as we ordered it, then grabbed a nose and chopped it into pieces for us.   After only a slight pause, Barry said, "When in Rome" and we dug in.  

It was weird.  There were nose hairs on some of the pieces, and what I can only assume were olfactory glands.  

It wasn't horrible, but I can say with confidence that I will never get a craving for nose.

Saturday we heard news that Roh Moo-hyun, the previous president of Korea, had committed suicide.  Apparently under investigation for embezzlement charges, he felt such shame that he jumped off of a cliff while hiking.  I didn't know anything about him before this news came around, but from what I learned afterwards he seemed like a pretty decent guy.  In a very conservative country, he was considered extremely liberal; he was a huge human rights activist and worked hard for reconciliation with the North.

An analogous situation would be Bush jumping into the grand canyon.

Saturday night, we were winding down the night at a chill bar, eating ramen noodles and drinking tequila, a combination that will not soon be repeated.  A Korean friend of Tim's was at the bar, drinking alone.  He came over to say hello, and also to make sure we had heard the news.  He was pretty beat up about it.  Tim asked him what he had been up to, and he admitted that after hearing the news, he stayed home and drank alone all day.  Then he excused himself to go back to the bar to mourn silently.

Tuesday, after returning to Mokpo, my composition class turned in their semester writing assessments.  Their assignment was to write a paper about the most important person in their life. The two most popular choices to write about were "My Mother" and "Roh Moo-hyun". 

Then, just to kick the South when it was down, Kim Jong-Il has claimed that the armistice that's been upheld between the North and the South for the past 56 years is no longer valid.  

A brief history:  The Korean war never truly ended, the North and South simply signed an armistice.  It still surprises me sometimes to think that I live in a country that is technically at war with North Korea.

Despite the absolution of the armistice, I'm not really too worried.  Nobody really seems to be.  Mr. Kim has been making threats to the South for so long, that it doesn't seem to upset anybody anymore.  After the breaking of the armistice however, there was a round of drills done at all the public schools in town.

The first I heard about the breaking of the armistice was from my friend Jens last week.  He sent me this message:

"I read this morning that North Korea promised to attack South Korea today or tomorrow.

And now there's a siren going off..."

My reaction was to let out an audible, "hmm" and then go back to grading papers.  A few minutes later I realized how ridiculous my reaction was and did some more research to see what exactly was going on.  Turns out nobody is really worried, and thinks this is just the North being fussy.  

It did, however, cause me to find this cool (scary) google maps hack that shows the radii of destruction of a nuclear bomb.  Apparently the North only has the capability to launch a 20 kiloton bomb, which means if one was dropped on the center of Mokpo, I'd probably still make it, so no worries.

Morning Call

If you read my last post, you learned that I bought a motorcycle.

If you read this post, you'll learn that I crashed that motorcycle.

Sunday I went out for a ride.  It was a gorgeous day, so I stocked up on some food, packed it in a backpack, and hit the tarmac.

On the trip to "That Moses Thing", we drove past a small fishing village where I caught a quick glimpse of the only sailboat I've seen in Korea.  I happened to pass it again Sunday, so I parked the bike and sat on the pier by the sailboat eating lunch, fantasizing about making an offer to the owner who never showed up.  My mind was tacking around secluded Korean islands, my body was sitting on a dirty concrete pier eating sandwiches and making vitamin D.

Eventually I moved on down some smaller country roads till I was out of the bay, and out on the sea.  There was nobody else on the road, so I could afford to go slow, savor the breeze, and stare at the sea off to my left.  It was beautiful.

It was on my way back into town that I had my first close encounter of the third kind with anAjumma's car.  Contact.

I watched, confused, as I rode down a 4 lane road and saw a woman pull her car out from my left and stop in front of oncoming traffic.  I slowed down.  When cars started coming from that direction, she pulled in front of my lane.  And stopped.  My right foot, right and left hands reacted simultaneously, kicking the rear brake, squeezing the front brakes, and jabbing at the horn, but it wasn't enough.  

The velocity of my bike could be seen as being undifferentiable at the moment of impact as it made a piecewise jump from ~8 to ~-1 kph before bouncing backwards and skidding to 0.  I on the other hand retained most of my momentum as I tumbled over the trunk and inexplicably found myself sitting behind the car, having transformed some of my kinetic energy to noise, and the rest to friction in the form of scratches on my helmet and biking jacket.  Somehow my skin was left perfectly intact.

To her credit she bounded out of the car to make sure I was O.K.  Driving away as fast as possible would have been more consistant with her actions.  When I took off my helmet and therefore advertized my skin color, she learned what I already knew; this was going to be a lot trickier to sort out than your average Korean-on-Korean accident.

My face adopted the confused look that one can only put on after an attempted murder by a complete stranger.  My face said, "Why are you trying to kill me?" as it shook back and forth.  

Her face said, "I swear I wasn't trying to kill you, I just don't know how to drive this weapon properly."

An interesting study would be the effect of adrenaline on memory and language skills.  In my case, I found that as I stood there with Superman Juice pumping through my veins, I was having one of the most coherent conversations I've had since I've been here.  

A man from a nearby shop showed up and was able to help the conversation along.  Not because he spoke simpler Korean, but because he would get an A+ in charades class, and was able to mime any vocabulary I hadn't learned.

No cops were called, but we did trade information in case one of us wanted to make a claim about our vehicle's damage.  She didn't have much to complain about, the elastic collision from the bike just left a black smudge from my tire on her otherwise white car.  I on the other hand stood up the bike to find that with the handlebars pointed forwards, the front wheel tilted off at a 35 degree angle.  

I was close enough to home that I was able to ride the bike back slowly, pretending that I was in the middle of a massive turn the entire way.

The next day, after work, I was planning on taking the bike to the shop, but instead sat and stared at it for a good half hour, contemplating the dangers this hunk of metal could bring to my otherwise peaceful life.  

I realized two things at the same time:

First, I realized that while it may increase risk in my life, it by no means guarantees further troubles.  I've been driving as I would back in the states, assuming other drivers actually know what they're doing.  I consider this a wake up call, or as they say in Konglish, a "morning call".  I have to assume every driver is trying to kill me.  Next time, I won't slow down at the first sign of sketchiness, I'll stop.

The second thing I realized was"Oh... that's what's wrong with it."

And so I got my wrench set from inside, loosened the shock supports, aligned the tire, tightened it all back up again and went for a test drive.